Some of these poems originally appeared, sometimes in earlier versions, in the following journals and magazines: American Chordata, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Bennington Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Gulf Coast, Iterant, The Nation, New England Review, The New York Review of Books, New York Tyrant, A Public Space, Split Lip, Spork, and Tupelo Quarterly. Thank you to the staff and editors, in particular Kaveh Akbar, David Barber, Rick Barot, Anselm Berrigan, Jordan Castro, Marianne Chan, Kristina Marie Darling, Michael Dumanis, Josh English, Brett Fletcher Lauer, Danika LeMay, Jana Prikryl, Sarina Romero, Elizabeth Scanlon, and Bianca Stone. “About Suffering” appeared on the PoetryNow podcast; thank you to Michael Slosek, Katie Klocksin, and the Poetry Foundation. “Don’t Think” appeared on the Slowdown podcast; thank you to Ada Limón.

Thank you to Monika Woods for all your support and guidance. Thank you to Sarah Jean Grimm—I feel lucky you found this book. Thank you to Mensah Demary, Sarah Lyn Rogers, and the gracious staff at Soft Skull. For additional help, various and hard to describe, thank you to Brandon Amico, Sommer Browning, Erin Costello, Todd Dillard, Sarah Rose Etter, Erinrose Mager, Catherine Nichols, Jennifer Olsen, Kathleen Rooney, Selah Saterstrom, Martin Seay, and Michael Joseph Walsh. Thank you to my group chats. Thanks and love to my family. Thanks and love to John Cotter, who told me I should write more poetry.

About the Author

© Adalena Kavanagh

ELISA GABBERT, a poet, critic, and essayist, is the author most recently of The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays and The Word Pretty. She writes a regular poetry column for The New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books, A Public Space, and elsewhere. Her next collection of essays, Any Person Is the Only Self, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.